Teacher Identity and the Struggle for Recognition by Jenlink Patrick M.;

Author:Jenlink, Patrick M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: R&L Education
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Embedded in teacher identity development needs to the be the what if. Empowering teachers’ vision and personal pedagogy must be coupled with the understanding that enacting personal pedagogy could result in power struggles. Failing to prepare teachers for this confrontation could result in a pendulum reaction, as evident in Torres’s (2002) comments, silencing an otherwise “awakened” teacher in their traumatic “postawakening.”

bell hooks (1999), referring to the university but with her statement equally applicable to public schooling, argued, “Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive” (p. 50–51). It is quite easy for teachers to be co-opted into silence and submission when they exhibit resistance to pedagogical machinery (Jones, 1990). I would not have considered—and still do not consider—my pedagogy “radical.” I consider it ethical and equitable.

However, when it is reflected in the “looking glass” (Woolf, 1929/1991, p. 35) of the patriarchal pedagogy of institutionalized schooling, it is considered radical. It is radical because it does not reflect “the figure of [the school] at twice its natural size” (p. 35) but reflects the inequity present in the power distribution. Woolf argued:

For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks. . . . How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself . . . at least twice the size he really is? (p. 36)

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